Walking his 5-year-old son Oliver to kindergarten at St. Leo the Great Catholic School on San Jose’s Race Street often fills Eloy Wouters with anxiety.

“There’s a lot of traffic, and you see people having to dodge traffic to cross the street,” Wouters said. “The children around schools, they always do something unexpected. It would just be much safer if people would drive slower.”

He may get his wish.

Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio wants San Jose to impose 15 mph speed limits around schools on residential streets throughout the city. The council’s Rules and Open Government Committee, which sets agendas, will consider Oliverio’s proposal Wednesday.

San Jose a year ago lowered the speed limit from the standard 25 mph to 15 mph on Dana Avenue near Trace Elementary School, Hoover Middle School and Lincoln High School, taking advantage of a 2008 state law. Assembly Bill 321 by Santa Barbara Democrat Pedro Nava allows local governments to lower speed limits around schools on two-lane roads in residential areas where the posted speed is 30 mph or less, and to expand school zones to 1,000 feet.

Oliverio said residents, parents and school staff have been pleased with the 15 mph limit on Dana Avenue, and expanding the reduced limit around other eligible schools would be a relatively inexpensive way to improve neighborhood safety and quality of life.

The councilman, who represents the Rose Garden and Willow Glen areas, said that when he led a city effort on traffic-calming measures, “everyone had concerns about speeding near schools, child safety and livability.”

Oliverio said the biggest hurdle to lowering posted speeds has been required engineering and traffic surveys. Despite the new law, he said, city transportation officials have argued such surveys must still be done, something that Oliverio said would add hundreds of thousands of dollars and considerable time to the effort of reducing speed limits.

But Oliverio said San Francisco recently moved to lower speed limits around some 200 schools in the city after concluding such surveys could be avoided.

Advocates for the 15 mph school-zone limit say the reduced speed saves lives. Deb Hubsmith, director of the Safe Routes to School national partnership, which promotes efforts making it safer for children to walk or bike to school, said half of people struck by a car going 30 mph survive, but 85 percent of those hit by cars going 20 mph live. A third of traffic fatalities involve children walking or biking, often near schools, she said.

Wouters, a physicist, isn’t surprised by such statistics.

“If you go twice as fast, it’s four times as bad,” Wouters said. “The reaction time also is much shorter if you go faster.”

Wouters has plenty of company supporting the 15 mph limit, but the idea also has many critics.

San Jose resident Gordon Laird said he could count the number of parents driving at or below the current 25 mph limit around Martin Murphy Middle School near Santa Teresa Boulevard on his fingers.

“How about we zealously enforce the current limit and see if that doesn’t solve the problem of school-zone mishaps?” Laird asked, adding that he’s seen little evidence of stepped-up enforcement despite numerous complaints to police. “In the end, 25 mph — if zealously enforced and obeyed by all — is probably more than slow enough to avoid mishaps.”

But Hubsmith, based in Fairfax, said, “That’s still too fast for kids to survive.”

John Woolfolk is a city news editor for the Bay Area News Group, based at The Mercury News. A native of New Orleans, he grew up near San Jose. He is a graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and has been a journalist since 1990, covering cities, counties, law enforcement, courts and other general news. He has been an editor since 2013.

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